1/06/2010 @ 10:00AM

Video Conferencing Is Within Your Reach

I live in a pretty nice area outside of Philadelphia. My kids go to the local public high school and on their first day of classes were issued brand new
Apple
Macbooks. That’s pretty nice. Not that they use them for actual school work. Most of the time they’re on Facebook and video-chatting.

Video-chatting. My 14-year-old year kids are doing this. My 14-year-old year old consulting business is not.

But that’s about to change. Video technology used to be too expensive for small businesses like mine. Now, new technologies are hitting the market and making it easier for small fry to play big.

Take Dr. Morgan DeFoort, co-director of the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory (EECL) at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State University. EECL does research on energy efficiency and conservation. Recently DeFoort’s group developed, and later helped commercialize, a low-cost stove for distribution throughout the developing world. That company now sells some 10,000 stoves a month.

The lab has a full-time staff of eight people, plus a dozen faculty members, over 40 undergraduate and graduate students, and a handful of outside partners who work on projects around the world. “We do a lot of computational work,” says DeFoort. “Recently we worked on how to improve a stove’s performance and modeled the combustion in three dimensions inside the stove. This is not just something you can talk about. We needed to see the results, too. It’s a very visual thing.”

Engineering-design work is all about collaboration, and that’s where video conferencing comes in handy. While remedial conferencing tools, like Skype, deliver low-quality graphics, high-end video-conferencing systems from the likes of
Cisco
and
Polycom
can run to $50,000. That left EECL out of luck. “We have to meet payroll each month,” says DeFoort. “I have a strict budget.”

Solution: HP Skyroom, new video-conferencing software aimed at small businesses, developed by
Hewlett-Packard
. (The Marks Group does no business with HP.) In 2008 DeFoort paid $149 per license. Each user also needs a webcam; those go for about $100 apiece. Set-up takes mere minutes. Once configured, cuing up a meeting was just a few clicks away. HP SkyRoom also works with some instant- messaging systems, like
Microsoft
Office Communicator. As with Skype, all that data runs over the Internet. (One caveat: You need a decent Internet broadband connection, at least 400 Kbps, to make it hum.)

DeFoort is hopped up on Skyroom’s quality. The data streams rarely get interrupted, and the graphics are great, with 1900 x 1080 pixels-per-line resolution or higher. (A normal computer screen delivers 1024 x 768.) “The free software I’ve tried, like Skype, doesn’t offer this kind of resolution,” says DeFoort. “It was worth the couple of hundred bucks to get this kind of quality.” And to save thousands of dollars in travel and unproductive time.

I’m a believer. While I don’t engineer stoves, I do have 10 employees, all of whom work out of their homes. Connecting face-to-face a lot more would make all of us more productive–which is why in the next few months I intend to install video-conferencing software on each of their computers. Later in the year I’ll follow up and let you know how it all worked out.